BCCL restructuring may cut 5-10% of workforce across departments & publications

Weeks after the Times Group began reorganising its businesses between Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) and Times Horizon Private Limited (THPL), the media conglomerate is understood to be undertaking a wider workforce restructuring that could result in a 5-10% reduction in headcount across publications and departments, according to people familiar with the development.

Additionally, around 10% of BCCL’s workforce has already been shifted to contractual employment, multiple sources confirmed to e4m. Most of the employees moved to the contractual structure have taken salary cuts of around 40%, the sources said.

The development marks a significant change in employment terms for a section of the workforce and comes as the group reviews roles, operating structures and costs across businesses.

According to an insider, “Department heads have recently met with team leads and asked them to prepare a list of roles that are no longer relevant. They have also been asked to identify job functions that could potentially be replaced by AI.”

“While there has been no formal announcement yet, there is a clear undercurrent,” said an editorial staffer.

The development follows the restructuring of BCCL’s Response, where more than 40 employees were asked to leave last week, as reported by e4m.

Read: BCCL undergoes restructuring, layoffs in Response

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That exercise had emerged as one of the first visible signs of a wider restructuring within the group. At the time, industry sources had indicated that around 40 employees could have been impacted, although the precise number could not be independently verified.

Notably, BCCL is one of India’s largest media companies, with iconic brands such as The Times of India and The Economic Times, considered the world’s largest-circulating English daily and second-largest-circulating English business daily, respectively. The group has around 7,000 employees across India.

Insiders say the changes extend beyond individual businesses and are being viewed within the organisation as part of a broader effort to consolidate overlapping businesses and improve efficiency across the group.

“A few publications and editions are likely to reduce their pagination and tweak their editorial strategies to revive their market presence and drive growth,” a senior executive said.

The restructuring comes at a time when the media and advertising businesses are facing pressure from changing consumer behaviour, slower growth in some traditional revenue streams and the rapid adoption of AI.

The pressure is bigger than BCCL

The backdrop to the restructuring is a publishing industry in which both the economics of print and the mechanics of digital distribution are changing simultaneously.

While India's newspaper business remains considerably more resilient than that of several Western markets, the economics are becoming harder. Data cited earlier by e4m showed that the circulation base of large newspaper companies declined to around 10 million in 2025 from roughly 15 million in 2019, while print-related revenues declined at an estimated 1-2% CAGR over the preceding seven years.

At the same time, digital is no longer providing publishers with the straightforward growth hedge it once promised.

Similar data reported by e4m earlier this year showed that 43 of the world's 50 largest English-language news websites had recorded year-on-year traffic declines, while 47 saw month-on-month declines in April. Major Indian news publishers were also part of that broader decline.

The reasons go beyond changing reader habits. Search engines increasingly answer queries within their own interfaces, social platforms have become less dependable sources of referral traffic and consumers are beginning to use generative AI tools directly to discover information.

For publishers, this raises a fundamental economic question: journalism may continue to reach audiences without necessarily generating the page view, advertising impression or direct audience relationship that historically accompanied that consumption.

That distinction is particularly relevant as BCCL deepens its own relationship with AI. Under the partnership announced this week, content from participating BCCL publications, including The Times of India and The Economic Times, can be surfaced through ChatGPT with attribution and links back to the original reports. BCCL and OpenAI have also said they will explore applications of the technology across archive discovery, research, data analysis, translation, reader services and business operations.

Any use of AI in BCCL newsrooms, the company has said, will remain subject to the editorial policies and standards of individual publications and human oversight.

There is no evidence so far to suggest that the OpenAI partnership is directly linked to the workforce exercise. The timing, however, brings into focus a much broader question confronting publishers: how the adoption of generative AI will change not only the distribution and monetisation of journalism, but also the workflows and organisational structures required to produce it.

The debate within publishing is consequently moving beyond traffic itself. Industry leaders have told e4m that direct audiences, loyalty, engagement, first-party data and profitability are becoming increasingly important measures of publishing health rather than sheer page views alone.

For large legacy publishers, the challenge therefore is not simply determining which individual tasks AI can perform. It is also deciding whether organisational structures designed around decades of print scale and, subsequently, search-driven digital traffic remain suitable for the next phase of the news business.

BCCL’s response

When asked about the layoffs, a top BCCL official denied the developments. “There is no predetermined headcount-reduction target. Like any progressive organisation, BCCL continuously reviews its processes, roles and operating structures to build greater efficiency and adopt emerging technologies, including AI, so that it remains agile, competitive and future-ready,” he said.

He added, “As responsibilities evolve, the emphasis is on role redesign, upskilling and redeployment wherever feasible. Similarly, individual editions periodically review pagination and content mix in line with audience needs and business performance.”

A larger organisational realignment

The latest moves also come against the backdrop of a formal reorganisation of BCCL’s businesses. In February, the Competition Commission of India approved the internal reorganisation of certain BCCL businesses into Times Horizon Private Limited (THPL). The exercise involves the demerger of the group’s EIBME businesses, covering a range of non-publishing activities, from BCCL into THPL.

The current workforce exercise appears to be separate from that legal restructuring, although industry sources see the two developments as part of a broader effort to sharpen business verticals and rationalise operations.

As part of that reorganisation, employees covered by the demerger began moving from BCCL to THPL from September 1. An earlier internal communication reviewed by e4m had specifically described that exercise as a “transfer of employment and not a separation from service” and said continuity of employment would be maintained. It also said existing employment terms and compensation would continue, subject to changes communicated separately.

That distinction is important. The transfer associated with the demerger and the workforce changes now being reported are not necessarily the same exercise. The latter, according to sources, involves a broader reassessment of roles and costs, including the shift of around 10% of the workforce to contractual employment, mostly at substantially lower salaries.

Publishers are rewriting their economics

Cost rationalisation is only one part of the adjustment underway across Indian publishing. The other is finding new sources of growth.

As e4m has previously reported, India's major newspaper companies are increasingly building businesses beyond the newspaper itself.

A CRISIL study cited by e4m estimated that the contribution of non-print businesses at major Indian dailies had risen from around 13% in FY19 to roughly 25%, with those businesses expected to grow 10-12% annually between FY25 and FY27, compared with just 2-3% for traditional print.

Those revenue engines increasingly span digital advertising and subscriptions, events, outdoor advertising, branded properties, education, content syndication and B2B services. The strategy is essentially to monetise assets publishers already possess, their brands, audiences, advertiser relationships, physical infrastructure and regional reach, without depending entirely on print and digital advertising.

There is a catch. Diversification does not automatically replicate the profitability of the businesses it is supplementing. The same CRISIL analysis expects margins from non-print businesses to remain around 12-13%, meaning publishers can successfully build new revenue streams and still face pressure to make legacy operations more efficient.

Seen in that context, the developments at BCCL sit at the intersection of three structural changes underway in publishing: pressure on the economics of legacy print, weakening dependence on traffic-led digital scale, and the emergence of AI both as a distribution disruptor and an operating tool.

The challenge for publishers is increasingly two-sided,  finding new revenue pools while simultaneously deciding what the organisation built around the old ones should look like.

For employees, however, the possibility of the job loss or pay cut would represent a significant change in the group’s workforce model.